( essay) the black saint and the best-selling writer Joe Miller When I first saw the “ABSTINENCE = FREEDOM” sticker on Jackie Story’s van, I wrote it down in my note- book, but I didn’t ask her about it. I wrote down “Scooby van,” too, and “light blue” and “rust.” And when I got home that night I opened my laptop and wrote from memory that it cost Jackie eighty-five dollars to fill the tank, and that she had to fill it often, and that she was having to turn down friends when they asked for rides home from church because she couldn’t afford it anymore, and that that’s not the kind of person she wants to be. 34 THE MISSOURI REVIEW / FALL 2013 TMRv36n3-text.indd 34 8/14/13 5:21 PM Photo by Tatenda Nyamande TMRv36n3-text.indd 35 8/14/13 5:21 PM I wrote this story: Jackie went to San Juan Motors, a used car lot up the street from her church, to trade the van and sign a contract for a white Ford Escort station wagon. The guy who sold it to her went to her church. He said to her, “I’m going to put a brand-new radio in it just for you because you are so terrific.” On the way home, she picked up one of her sons from church and another from school, and every time anyone opened the car doors the tuner would reset to the left-most position on the dial and the speakers would scream with static. The radio slid right out of the dashboard and onto the floor whenever she accelerated from a full stop. Then, a week later, the wagon broke down in front of the Hobby Lobby and Cracker Barrel on a parkway in the suburban Northland of Kansas City, three and a half miles from her house. Jackie was the main character of a book about a mixed-race, inner-city Pentecostal megachurch that I never wrote. Several times a week I would follow her around, scribbling notes in a narrow notepad, asking her ques- tions, trying to find a story and a shape to her life that would fit me and the rest of the world. She didn’t have time to be without a car. Her two youngest sons, P.J. and Jonathan, were starting public school after years of home schooling. Cameron, her second oldest, was eighteen, jobless and carless, and he still expected her to provide everything he needed and most of what he wanted. She worked as a part-time hospice aide, did some sporadic work as a model and ran an as-yet unprofitable busi- ness venture that she described to me as “kind of like a direct-marketing business opportunity, except we sell phone service, and everybody needs that.” Even when her car was working, she felt like she needed an extra hour each day and an extra day each week—a “Smonday,” as her pastor liked to say. Without a car she had to take the bus everywhere, had to hoof it an hour and a half in both directions, on a hilly stretch, just to catch the nearest ride. It had been hot that fall, too, with a couple of days in the high 90s. At times it seemed like more than she could handle. When she felt overwhelmed, she said, she imagined herself a Sherman tank, slow but relentless, and strong—just like the motivational speaker had said a year earlier in a speech at a business conference she went to in Anaheim. It was the climax of his pep talk, the highlight of the whole convention, when he marched back and forth across the stage, imitating a tank, and the crowd went wild, knowing they had what it would take to make their prayers come true. I’d been around Jackie long enough to know that her prayers were for easy money and for the time it would buy. Jackie wanted to give every waking minute to her sons, to her brothers 36 THE MISSOURI REVIEW / FALL 2013 TMRv36n3-text.indd 36 8/14/13 5:22 PM and sisters at her church, to herself and to God. But so long as she was poor, she had to trudge through life, and trudge harder still without a car. I offered to drive her around for a day so she could take care of a bunch of short-trip errands that had piled up and so I could get more material for my book. She didn’t mind sharing. When I picked her up at her townhouse, the right half of a double unit on a cul-de-sac in a subdivision that had been carved into a forest in the early ’70s, her two youngest weren’t home from school yet, and Cameron was out with his girlfriend. We headed off to the nearest library branch. Jackie needed to print a letter she’d written at home on an old IBM 786 that didn’t have a printer, a polite but assertive missive to the used car dealer demanding a refund of the $1,200 down payment she’d made on the Escort. “The car’s obviously a lemon,” she told me as she sat down at one of the library’s computer stations. “But I don’t want to sue him because I know he’s try- ing to have a relationship with Christ.” She slid a floppy disk into the computer, and the computer spit it back out. She laughed and shook her head. It was the only copy; she’d saved it to the disk, not the hard drive, like Jonathan, her baby, had told her to do. She stared at the screen for a long moment, smiling. If it had been me, I’d have been consumed with rage and self pity. When I first interviewed Jackie, at a Christian coffee shop in a storefront between a payday loan shop and the license bureau in a strip mall, she told me she found satis- faction in hard times. Contrary to her dreams of work-free wealth, she said things were more valuable to her if she had to overcome obstacles to get them, and I knew then that she would be my lead character. I’d started my project during the insufferable stretch between the com- pletion of the final draft of my first book and its publication, a period of six or seven months of casting about to unearth a story big enough to impress the big publishing houses in New York. My first book had sold when I was still working as a newspaper reporter, for four times my salary at the time. I quit my job before the first check arrived. It was the start of a new life: less work, more money, greater respect. I’d sell a book every couple of years, and through them I’d live on forever in libraries all around the world. I got the idea for the second book after Bush won reelection, thanks in large part to Christian voters. The nation was deeply divided, as it still is today, and I wanted to tell a story about why, so I went off exploring the roots of the Christian right. I zeroed in FALL 2013 / THE MISSOURI REVIEW 37 TMRv36n3-text.indd 37 8/14/13 5:22 PM on the Pentecostal movement, which was in its hundredth year at the time. With half a billion members, it had become the most populous and fastest-growing segment of Christianity on earth. It had begun as a mixed-race, grass roots movement in 1906, under the leadership of William Seymour, a one-eyed son of former slaves who gathered a group of whites, blacks and Hispanics in a former livery in the slums of Los Angeles. Together they sought to recreate the earliest days of Christianity, as described in the book of Acts, when, on the day of the Pentecost, “a mighty sound” and “cloven tongues like as of fire” descended on the fledgling Christians and they “began to speak with other tongues” and they were “all with one accord.” That part resonated with me: All with one accord. I thought it would be a good title for a book. Jackie’s church was Pentecostal—Assemblies of God, a white-only denomination formed in acquiescence to Jim Crow laws by the nation’s leading white Pentecostal pastors in 1914. In 2006, Jackie’s church was one of its largest and most dynamic congregations and, in defiance of history, it was evenly mixed with blacks and whites. On Sundays, they came from all over the Kansas City metropolitan area, from the most distant suburbs to the poorest and most run-down neighborhoods in the urban core. It seemed to me a miracle in a city as segregated as mine. Their motto and theme song was “We Are Family,” and I liked that, the same way I liked the idea of all with one accord. I liked that Pentecostals call themselves “saints.” I’d been to the church several years earlier, to attend their annual apocalyptic Christmas pageant with my girlfriend. The play was famous around Kansas City for its outrageous plot, pyrotechnics and flying Jesus with a flaming sword. We went to laugh at the campiness, but we walked out feeling disturbed—Allie for the portrayal of gays as sinners bound for hell, me for the prophesy that Satan would rise up through the United Nations.